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Comment by jetpks | Hacker News Reader

> Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.

Depression definitely can be caused by abuse. In fact if you're being abused you are probably also depressed.

Depression and other mental illnesses are also often caused by things that can't be externally influenced at all.

Casually linking poor parenting with mental illness enforces a stigma that discourages people from seeking treatment for themselves or for their children.

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I didn't read GP as necessarily being about abuse, but even stuff like the parents arguing in front of the child.

I didn't read GPs post that way either, however I still agree with jetpks' point regarding depression. Mental illness is a medical condition so cannot be dismissed as a parenting problem. While some instances of depression will be symptoms of a child's home life, others will be medical.

I don't understand how the parenting problem being the root cause of the mental illness dismisses the mental illness.

Imagine if the child is sick (eg in pneumonia) it wouldn't dismiss the illness if I explained how the child got sick because their parents left them outside freezing.

It's not dismissing, it's analyzing the root cause, to try and help the child. If something causes illness (mental and/or physical), we should take care of both the illness and the cause.

In the case of depression, finding a true unique cause is still open for debate/research, but it shoudn't prevent us from helping someone who's depressed.

Depression is a vague overly-general term so it differs from person to person. There isn't going to be a "true unique cause". In some instances it's just a result of chemical imbalances rather than emotional conditioning from the parents. Thus you cannot brush depression of as being environmental.

A cause isn't necessarily environmental, it can be, and even if it is "a result of chemical imbalances", there's still a cause, and if we could find the causes for the multiple forms of mental illnesses wouldn't that be good?

What he is trying to get at, is that some mental illness are genetic, people are born with them, and due to people frequently insisting that they are always result of external factors, it leads to people that were born with genetic problems to not get treated as parents either are ashamed or feel insulted and refuse treatment.

(Disclaimer: this happened to me. I have confirmed ADHD and maybe aspergers too, but my parents were so offended when schools asked them to take me to a doctor that only now in my adulthood I am being treated properly)

Sorry if I'm reading into this too much but are you implying that medical conditions cannot have environmental causes?

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